Rather, a crush is a way to take up space, and to make something about yourself known to the world.

The underlying, unarticulated assumption of this political talk was that victims and criminals were two distinct categories of people with diametrically opposed interests.

Miniatures are satisfying not because they are grand, but because they are exact. “It is the accuracy, the rightness, that is so rewarding,” according to writer Alice Gregory. “It is a relief . . . to be in the presence of precision—and be allowed to like it.”

Dollhouses are an almost too-literal example of these women’s shrunken ambitions—of how, when you don’t have control over the big decisions shaping your life, you narrow your focus to a world that’s small enough for you to impose your will on it.

This helps explain why television programs about violent death can feel so strangely soothing: they teach us that even the most senseless crimes can be interpreted and, ultimately, explained.

Part of the curriculum of growing up as a girl is to learn lessons about your vulnerability—if not from your parents, then from a culture that’s fascinated by wounded women.

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow, her bestselling account of the War on Drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, more black men are currently under correctional control in the United States than were enslaved in 1850.

they weren’t the only ones warping my sense of reality—it was also the many flavors of online Nazi, the school shooters and the girls who longed to love them, the edgelords and their aggressive brooding, cranky old Ayn Rand—all these various manifestations of a worldview that insisted what mattered most was power, and that getting attention gave

I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.